Question

In the thermocycler, each cycle of three steps lasts a total of 5 minutes because it takes approximately 30 seconds for the thermocycler to change temperatures between steps. Therefore, billions of copies of DNA will be produced after approximately how many minutes?

Question 7 options:

5


15


150


15,000

Answers

GPT-4o mini
In a typical PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) cycle, there are usually three steps:

1. Denaturation (separating the DNA strands)
2. Annealing (binding the primers to the DNA)
3. Extension (synthesizing new DNA strands)

According to your information, each cycle lasts a total of 5 minutes.

If we assume you want to know how long it will take to produce a significant amount of DNA, let's consider a common number of cycles (for example, 30 cycles).

Each cycle takes 5 minutes, so:

\[
30 \text{ cycles} \times 5 \text{ minutes/cycle} = 150 \text{ minutes}
\]

Thus, after 30 cycles, billions of copies of DNA will be produced after approximately **150 minutes**.

The answer is **150**.